Gnome BODY (important!)

Ah, that makes sense. You can fix that pretty easily. Once you've got the power open in HD, there should be a "Totaling Options" dropdown that'll say "Add to Secondary Value". If you switch that to "Do not add to Totals" it'll exclude it from the main tallies. Hadn't realized that the EB was meant to add to the TK, I'd read that as a stand-alone attack. 14d6 makes a lot more sense as a big gun attack, especially if he's fond of haymakers.

I'm not sure which attack is his Torque attack, but I don't see anything really scary in his powerset. I also can't grok where the 39 rDEF figure is coming from, unless you're including the conditional Armor in that tally. Lastly, which TK is the continuous EB linked to?

Well sure, but this is HERO. Death in HERO results from BODY damage. If you don't want the killing curse to involve damage, how do you think it should determine lethality? Do you think you'd be able to provide a few "black box" examples of use in play? Without considering how the power is built, show how it'd be used, what rolls are involved, what happens when it works, what happens when it fails? It's a lot easier to build something when you know what inputs cause what outputs.

Depends entirely on how your players will take being told their PCs run away. It's also likely to piss off anyone who went high EGO low PRE, since it'll feel like their high EGO is being ignored.

Characters are either immune, take him out fast, or lose. 4d6 PRE drain will give some PCs a 9- not-run-away roll. 7d6 generally ends the fight.

Poorly. They'd have to hope their target rolled straight 1s. That said, someone with 0 OCV is already thoroughly screwed.

I'd assume that by that point they wouldn't be newbies anymore, though I don't know how fast the players you interact with learn nor how frequently you switch things up in your games. As opposed to +5 DCV doing basically that already? +5 on a 3d6 is huge.

Why does a RNG houserule need to be "fair" for any game other than the one it's implemented in? And what does "fair" mean anyways? Switching to a NDB system for to-hit rolls steepens the curve, but what if that's what the GM wants? Maybe the GM wants a game where everyone starts at the same CV and small bonuses or penalties are highly influential.

Ah, that makes more sense. If it's permitted, a Dispel BODY is actually a very viable method of picking off medium or lower BODY targets. A 60 AP version will pretty reliably instagib a 15 BODY target for example.

That actually smooths out as the number of dice rolled increases. The more dice NDB you're rolling the larger the variance becomes. https://anydice.com/program/14009 Moreover, as you increase the number of dice rolled, the chance of beating a slightly larger pool increases. https://anydice.com/program/1400a

How is a Drain all or nothing?

AP caps flat don't work as a balancing mechanism. Take the guy with a 12d6 blast, 0 END cost. 90 AP. Take the guy with a 12d6 blast and an END reserve large enough to spam this blast forever. Cost depends on his SPD, but this doesn't breach 60 AP. Both have roughly equal power and utility. Why is the former banned but the latter permitted? Take the guy with a 12d6 blast, Indirect. >60 AP. Take the guy with a 12d6 blast and a handful of CSLs for bouncing it. Cost again varies, but fits in 60 AP per power. Why is the former banned but the latter permitted? Take the guy with a 12d6 blast, Affects All Desolid. 90 AP. Why should he have to cut that down to 8d6 just because he has better performance in rare edge cases? It goes on and on and on. The problem is that AP measures both power, which is desirable to numerically constrain, and utility, which makes no sense to numerically constrain. What would be better is a discourse on "effective DCs" based on certain advantages like AoE or AP that really do increase the power of an attack.

The more I think about the Clinging Darkness power the more I think it'll bite the PC in the ass frequently enough to be vaguely balanced. - It likely impacts his allies just as much as his enemies. Shooting into the darkness should be horribly inaccurate and anyone in melee is also in darkness. - The occasional villain with a non-visual targeting sense benefits from being Clinging Darkness'd. - AOEs still don't care. A Blaze Away maneuver still doesn't care. Bunches of mooks still don't care that much, there's always more. - He'll make himself a priority target if he gets carried away with it. - He has to roll to hit the victim. All in all it shouldn't be that much worse than a 12d6 Flash.

I'd suggest you sit down with him and ask what circumstances he thinks it should work in and what circumstances he thinks it shouldn't. Once you know when it won't work, you can assess what you feel the limitation is worth. You also should be very clear up front as to if you'll allow his Darkness power to count as the darkness/shadows his other powers require.

You seem to have provided Proper Nouns to seek out and clear unstated information to ask about. There's obvious ways forward. That said, I could see how a player wouldn't follow those paths. The following isn't intended as a factual criticism, it's intended to represent how a player might see the information presented as unusable. Please take it in that light. A : The DNPC is the GM's mouthpiece. If the GM wanted me to have information on who they were meeting with or what about, the DMPC would have told me. Therefore, I shouldn't waste time asking about what I'm not meant to know. B : I don't have much information on the car-burning. What am I supposed to do with a burnt car and dead woman? It's already clear superpowers were involved, and I don't remember any flame-themed villains so can't track them down. C : A burglary isn't an arson/murder, the two clearly aren't connected. And I'm a superhero, why should I be investigating a mundane crime? D : Mystery plots are just the GM forcing us to read his mind and ask the right people the right things for no apparent reason, that's not fun so I'm not going to try.

Long story short, a sufficiently large dice pool behaves very similarly to 3d6. More formally, both approximate bell curves. The question will be if you like the change in behavior caused by the different RNG scheme. Can it work? Sure, it's the same basic curve. Will it work out-of-box with just a simple conversion formula? I doubt it, I'd expect recosting and balance changes to be necessary. Here, have some data to process. First number is OCV, second is DCV, output is % chance to hit. https://anydice.com/program/13f25

I've always been of the opinion that anti-power powers need to be targeting either something universal (ED, SPD, Running) or a SFX (magic, fire, body-alteration) to make sense.

The villain is still left with 33 def and -8 DC negation. A 12 DC hero who haymakers will do jack diddly squat a full eighty-seven percent of the time. A 12 DC hero who doesn't haymaker cannot inflict damage. That is absolutely absurd. Even more absurd is that it would take a hundred and thirty-six such haymakers to down her, with an additional 35 per recovery she gets. Gravitar as presented by you is functionally invincible against standard 12 DC attacks until her END runs low.

It's a word. Words don't magically have hurtfulness or evil stapled to them, they're just words. Some people may get upset if you use some words, but if you're not being malicious that's entirely their business. It's up to you to decide how much you care about those people's feelings and how much you care about your freedom of expression.

As a GM, I'd ask in what way the Linked limited anything. When would your Always On power not be on? Basically never, right? So what restriction does that place on the use of your Armor? Basically none, right? So I would say that Linked would be worth -0. Also, as Greywind mentioned, HERO strongly suggests buying "always big/small" as a set of benefits with the "size" SFX and the appropriate size physical limitation.

That is perfect.

Yes, which means that the guy playing Metal Rhino the man-with-superpowers-and-a-few-gadgets has strictly more options than the guy playing Rhino Man the man-with-same-superpowers-but-no-gadgets. The former can say "I turned my Rhino Boots into rocket-rollerblades so I can skate and fly!", the latter can't fly ever. It's blatant concept superiority.

To tangent off this, one of the best ways to make a player feel like they made good character creation decisions is to build a competent villain with a critical weakness to one particular PC. Put the Invisible Man against a party containing a blind hero, or The Human Lantern against a party containing Fireproof Man. They'll react like it's Christmas.

But why were they given the DEX needed to get those CVs in the first place?

I clearly haven't communicated well. D&D See Invisible lets you see things as though they weren't invisible. HERO has a bunch of adders that provide ways to see better. Building See Invisible as a non-sight detect means the subject of See Invisible won't benefit from their sight adders which contradicts the SFX of seeing the invisible.